The race walks at this year’s European Athletics Championships (10-16 August) may have captured the headlines because of the two world records that were set by María Pérez and Sofia Fiorini, but behind the scenes the talking point was the private 5G network set up by Neutral Wireless to cover the event.
The race walks followed a 1km city centre loop around the host city of Birmingham, something that led to a choice for production partner Actua Sports, as Frank Choquard, director at the company, explains.
“We could have done it with traditional broadcast RF, or we could do it with private 5G. So we contacted Neutral Wireless and asked if they could create a dedicated 5G bubble, because we would like to explore this technology.”
One reason behind the move was that Actua wanted to introduce monowheels to the race walk, rather than using cameras on motorbikes to capture the action, something designed to bring viewers closer to the action. Reliability had to be guaranteed, however.
“We came and did a test earlier in the year as performance depends on how the spectrum is in the area,” explains Damian Muir, senior sales manager, Neutral Wireless. “It was fine so we were confident we could deliver.”
Once the decision had been made, the two companies worked closely to ensure the best outcome.
“We were presented with a map of where of where the cameras would ideally go, and we then highlighted the best place to put antennas,” Muir adds. “It was then a case of checking we could get power and fibre there or if we would need a battery. Actua did a lot of the heavy lifting on the event, so all we had to do was run the simulations to see how we could optimise the coverage and go back a few times with what was possible.”
The portable nature of the setup meant build up time on site was equally painless.
“We had four cells running three radios for the race walk. We had one cell up on Thursday [before the event on Saturday] and the rest was rigged on the morning of the event,” he adds.
Private 5G was also utilised in the Alexander Stadium which hosted the track and field events during the championship, with a server running two cells to the venue, something which proved popular with rights holders.
“Rights holders who hadn’t booked dedicated 5G started the event and struggled with unstable connectivity, so some of them came back and asked if they could connect their device to the private 5G because they need guaranteed bandwidth to do their own coverage of the warm-up, or to do interviews in the stand, or just again to do more content. It’s quite interesting to see how that could be done,” adds Choquard.
For Neutral Wireless, the championships was another successful outing, with learnings from previous large-scale events including the Olympics feeding into the outcome.
“This is probably the second or third biggest thing we’ve done in terms of how much equipment we need to put into it,” says Muir. “But in terms of the challenge, it’s not been too bad. The biggest thing is making sure that all the units are updated beforehand, and that everyone knows to use the sound card slots. Knowing about those potential issues and sorting that all out in advance means it’s much smoother.”
